I do think having readily-available sources on social media posts is something to keep exploring. It's not that we need the government to police the internet - that would get bad real quick. We need these companies, and the government, and all of us, to act as librarians of information, in better accessible ways, so that users can determine where this information is coming from and it has merit or not.

I don't have any answer as to how that would be implemented. I don't think we need police. We just need more transparency and information.

 

Well libraries are funded by the government, so? What if Silicon Valley (social media, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) was nationalized?

I literally haven't thought through what that would mean, so someone please school me.

 

He was mostly overlooked at the time, but Andrew Yang tried harder to start a "national conversation" about these issues than just about anyone else. The idea of people actually owning their own data and being paid dividends for it is a good one imo.

 

think of all the jobs created from cleaning up people's BS with facts

 

I have a lot to say about this subject, as I was involved in the creation of the moderating system for Facebook Live.

 

I think the big problem is that the fake news type people are simply more vocal on social media platforms and there aren't enough sensible voices pushing back loudly enough.
That and a lot of people seem to have a bizarre tendency to just believe what they see & read without actually checking if it's true.

To fix such things long term won't be easy, it would require education at school level for a start and I don't see government adding that to the curriculum.

I'm not a fan of banning or censoring people for voicing different opinions, free speech allows anyone to spout whatever crackpot views they want. And it gives others the right to shoot down such opinions if they choose to.

 

It seems obvious but a minimum free speech standard that ought to be able to be agreed on is no death, rape or other threats of violence. That'd take out a log of the bad traffic but how to enforce it?

 

Maybe Vivec could offer more insight into it, but those things are already against social media platforms' terms of service.

 

Which suggests sheer quantity and frequency of the bad traffic overwhelms a moderating team. Which is likely both also under resourced and underpaid.